Enterprise ruby applications

[Dan North]

Hi all.

I'm looking for evidence to present Ruby as a suitable language for
"enterprise" development. By that I mean building large, robust
solutions, typically interfacing with legacy systems, often with an
asynchronous and/or distributed flavour.

The reason for this is that I work for a software development
consultancy where I predominantly use Java and J2EE (or C# and .Net) in
my day job, and Ruby for all my hobby projects. And I'd love to be using
Ruby for "proper" projects too! I am lucky enough that if I can put a
good case together, there is a chance someone will want to hear it, so
that's what I'm going to do.

The sort of thing I am after is:
- stories of any large-scale Ruby project successes
- projects/utilities that would help enable these sorts of projects (I'm
already looking on RAA but any pointers would be useful)
- reasons why a client might choose Ruby if it were simply a choice of
which language would best deliver a project.

I'm happy to take any of this out of ruby-talk if people think it OT -
I'm just interested in presenting a fair case for Ruby. I don't want to
over-hype it but I do want to know if it can do more than the (hugely
productive) stuff I already know about.

I'm not trolling - I don't want any "Ruby is better than xxx because..."
otherwise it just descends into flaming.

Also, I'm a huge fan of TDD and I've already been using the Test::Unit
stuff extensively and with very pleasing results (very simple code base
doing quite complicated things). So any thoughts along XP/TDD lines are
more than welcome.

Cheers,

 

[Tobias Reif]

I'm looking for [...]:
- stories of any large-scale Ruby project successes

http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RealWorldRuby
"NASA Langley Research Center uses Ruby to conduct simulations [...]" etc

Tobi

 

[Dan North]

Thanks Tobias.

This is exactly the sort of stuff I'm looking for. I am also very
interested in people's anecdotal experience, and any advice about what
does and doesn't work in the Rubiverse. ("I miss the refactoring support
from IDEA/Eclipse", "you really have to develop test-first because of
the absence of compile-time type checking").*

Cheers,
Dan

* btw. the sources of these comments are fans of Ruby - their overall
tone was extremely positive.

I'm looking for [...]:
- stories of any large-scale Ruby project successes

http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RealWorldRuby
"NASA Langley Research Center uses Ruby to conduct simulations [...]" etc

Tobi